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EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

nextcloud.com

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Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#41

Post by claudius »

novaRom wrote: post #34

I first thought it's about a new competitor for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. A bit misleading headline. According to Wikipedia: Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. More properly would be to say: cloud storage. It's very bad Europe has no its own public cloud yet. All universities, schools, research centers, public services can be much more efficient and secure tha…

A fair number of universities and research institutes already use Nextcloud, e.g. the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility offers a Nextcloud installation for all users and TU Berlin also offers one for all of its students. There's no reason for these things to live in a "public cloud", whatever that means, self-hosting them is much more efficient, privacy friendly and secure (if only by compartmentalising).

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#42

Post by SanchoPanda »

The new dashboard app/widget dock looks great. Looks like it's a totally different app from the old unmaintained one which got buggy and then low ratings, but the new dev kept that listing and is working to get it back up.

Playing life on expert mode, respect.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#44

Post by jospoortvliet »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #28
secfirstmd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Nextcloud have end to end encryption on it yet? I'm a fan of it but until it does I might wait

Yup. https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-13-brings-secure-file-s...

Sadly it's still in testing, but we (finally) managed to hire a 2nd developer so we're moving forward... 3rd job position is still open so if you're in C++ or know somebody who is - let them mail us!

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#45

Post by jospoortvliet »

nominated1 wrote: post #26
cafxx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like someone didn't bother reading the linked page...

Those quotes read like typical PR statements made by politicians. I was hoping for a bit more. I can’t find it now but it wasn’t long ago that the NextCloud (or was it OwnCloud) FAQ had a note about security that read something like “we’re busy adding features we’ll get to security later”. It left me feeling uneasy. I would have hoped security would have been part of the design. Maybe I’m just getting old...

Things have changed a fair bit since the early ownCloud days - you'll be hard pressed to find a large PHP app with so few security issues, and that's not me saying that but quoting a pentest firm hired by the Swiss city of Geneva which audited Nextcloud recently. See https://nextcloud.com/secure - thoughts are, of course, always welcome.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#46

Post by jospoortvliet »

zepearl wrote: post #25

Just asking: the new plans of "Owncloud" won't have any repercussion on "Nextcloud", right? Question based on 1) the fact that Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud and 2) this post... https://owncloud.com/owncloud-infinite-scale-owncloud-unveil... ...as reported e.g. here (I had problems loading the above page): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https:/... Meaning: Nextcloud won't follow a similar direc…

First of all, we forked 3 years ago and have progressed very fast since then - there is, from what I know, no code going between the two code bases since 2 years or so.

Second, there is simply no reason to rewrite everything from scratch. We know our code base well enough to be able to maintain and keep driving it forward.

Nextcloud can already scale to hundreds of millions of users. See nextcloud.com/globalscale - GS is in production since 2017 and at at least one customer, some nodes have shown to scale to 250K users, as part of a larger architecture designed for tens of millions. We have about a half dozen other customers using GS or working on deployments, and some in proof-of-concept stage.

In short, we have no plans to change a working, proven architecture which actually scales from Raspberry Pi to a global deployment for something which actually doesn't do either of those.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#47

Post by jospoortvliet »

codedokode wrote: post #38
nominated1 wrote: post #19

Do EU Governments care about security? Has a proper audit of this monstrosity been done? Or is this just another ploy to get better pricing?

Where is information stored securely? On a private server not accessible from outside and protected by law or on foreign publicly accessible servers not protected by local laws?

So both the German and French governments host Nextcloud firewalled off from the internet. Others use things like a reverse proxy (City of Geneva). Most customers just run Nextcloud internet-facing, as that is the easiest if you want to collaborate and work remotely. We trust Nextcloud to be perfectly safe for that, at least as safe as any complex piece of software can every be, of course. We have a very active security team, the latest security measures and a bug bounty program where you get up to $5K for reporting issues to us.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#48

Post by LinuxBender »

Aeolun wrote: post #30
LinuxBender wrote: post #20

Nextcloud is really cool. A coworker had initially set it up for an in-house place for our team to store more sensitive things that we didn't want floating around on confluence or google docs. It didn't last long. The legal team didn't like the AGPL license and we had to abandon the project. Too bad really, the interface is very nice and the file level encryption was a big plus.

Why would the legal team care about the license in this case?

Fear. I think they are over-cautious. They don't want AGPL code running in an environment that could be perceived as part of our customer environment.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#49

Post by jospoortvliet »

LinuxBender wrote: post #48
Aeolun wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the legal team care about the license in this case?

Fear. I think they are over-cautious. They don't want AGPL code running in an environment that could be perceived as part of our customer environment.

They should contact us - Nextcloud GmbH. A contract with us contains all indemnification they could ever want, so it should not be an issue at all. (A)GPL is used in a countless business environments, they're tried-and-true licenses that have been proven to be pro-customer. Especially if you have a proper vendor contract it's actually a huge advantage over the various vendor licenses and their often heavy-handed anti-user clauses.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#50

Post by zepearl »

jospoortvliet wrote: post #46
zepearl wrote: post #25

Just asking: the new plans of "Owncloud" won't have any repercussion on "Nextcloud", right? Question based on 1) the fact that Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud and 2) this post... https://owncloud.com/owncloud-infinite-scale-owncloud-unveil... ...as reported e.g. here (I had problems loading the above page): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https:/... Meaning: Nextcloud won't follow a similar direc…

First of all, we forked 3 years ago and have progressed very fast since then - there is, from what I know, no code going between the two code bases since 2 years or so. Second, there is simply no reason to rewrite everything from scratch. We know our code base well enough to be able to maintain and keep driving it forward. Nextcloud can already scale to hundreds of millions of users. See nextcloud.com/globalscale - G…

Great, this makes me happy:)

Thanks a lot for mentioning the interesting details!

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